Do you hear that? It’s the sound of a harpoon traveling in the air, slicing and penetrating the armor of the deadliest enemies in Eorzia. A harpoon by itself isn’t sufficient enough to possess such power – perhaps it’s the wielder we should be looking at.

Yes, the Lancer class of the Disciple of War is what we’re talking about; an all-out offensive melee class that excels at acrobatic control of the versatile pole-arm weapons.

FFXIV Online: ARR The Lancer

The Lancer, alongside the Pugilist, are two major primary melee DPS classes in the Disciple of War. They excel at dealing damage and possess fantastic reach, making them hard to hit even as melee characters.

What makes the Lancer class outstanding is that it can combine with a Marauder class to obtain the Dragoon Job, which is one of the most powerful Jobs in the game.

The Lancer skills all primarily focus on hardcore damage with speed and reach, making them a very superior offense class. The only downside to the class is the major limit to the weapon type – but then again, most classes suffer from this problem.

Recommended Race
It’s hard not to choose the Roegadyn (Sea Wolves) when you’re starting off as a Lancer. Their brute physique and stature makes them ideal, not to mention that they grant you lots of innate Strength, the main attribute for Lancers. An alternative race would be the Hyur.

Combat Role

The Lancer is a melee DPS character that utilizes its long reach and powerful offensive skills to dish in as much damage to enemies as possible. The main weapons that the Lancer class can use include Spears, Harpoons, Lances, Forks, and Halberds.

The most important stat for the Lancer is hands down Strength. Without Strength, your Lancer will be as good as useless. In addition to Strength, it is recommended to occasionally invest in Dexterity for some critical strike, though it is not entirely essential.

If you are playing in a party, it is best to solely invest in the Strength attribute and leave the critical strikes to the Pugilist and the Archer.

Once the Lancer reaches level 30, he/she can choose to specialize in the Dragoon Job. This is highly recommended for just about any type of Lancer, since Dragoon is a very powerful and balanced physical melee Job and almost completely annihilates the Lancer’s weaknesses.

Skills

The skillset of the Lancer is abundant with a variety of attacks that focus on dealing heavy damaging. Some skills also provide buffs to the Lancer, mostly all physical damage. This gives the Lancer a lot of offensive positivity, but the class is somewhat lacking in defense.

Off-Class Abilities

Though the Lancer excels at dealing damaging, the class lacks somewhat in survivability, since it has no formal skill to aid its healing.

This is where opting for Off-Class abilities comes into play. Basically, you can use certain shareable abilities of other classes for your main class, which in this guide’s case is the Lancer.

In order to do that, you must first unlock those certain abilities by playing as the other class within the same game. You can change classes at will by visiting guilds in the game.

Once you have leveled that class, say, a Conjurer to a certain level, all the unlocked shared abilities of the Conjurer will be available to your Lancer. This way, you can utilize a mix of offensive and defensive skills from other classes to give your character more versatility.

It is important to note that you can only select other classes for off-class abilities after completing your main class quest that is available at level 10.

Recommended Off-Class Abilities for the Lancer
Even though it seems obvious to go for the Conjurer to grab Cure and Protect for giving more survivability to your Lancer, I highly recommend leveling the Marauder as an alternate first.

This is because leveling the Marauder to level 15 is essential for the Dragoon Job. Now, many would state that jobs are highly specialized roles that work best in parties only.

This is true for all the other classes, but the Dragoon is perhaps the most refined Job, as it grants health-from-damage skills from the Marauder skillset, and also gives additional super-strength skills as well.

These abilities make the Lancer much more powerful and dominant enough to survive almost all sorts of scenarios, giving him/her an off-tank, super-DPS sort of characteristics.

Of course, if you have the stamina to grind lots of levels and won’t mind slow progress, then consider getting both Conjurer and Marauder skills

The recommended Conjurer skills to consider are:

Cure (level 2)

Protect (level 8)

The recommended Marauder skills are:

Foresight (level 2)

Bloodbath (level 8)

Skills Rotation

The Lancer’s skill rotation is fairly simple, except when you have promoted yourself to a Dragoon. In case of a Vanilla Lancer, the skills should be rotated according to situation.

When you have a single target, consider faster hits while dealing as much damage as possible. When you are surrounded, then use AoE and debuff skills.

For single enemies:

Heavy Thrust

True Thrust

Vorpal Thrust

Full Thrust

Return to True Thrust until the buff from Heavy Thrust runs out, and then repeat.

For multiple enemies:

Internal Release

Heavy Thrust

Ring of Thorns

Doom Spike

Repeat Doom Spike till the buff of Heavy Thrust runs out.

For tougher enemies:

Internal Release

Impulse Drive

Disembowel

Chaos Thrust

Heavy Thrust

True Thrust

Vorpal Thrust

Full Thrust

(Raging Strike)

(Blood for Blood)

Repeat True Thrust till the Disembowel debuff runs outs. Raging Strike and Blood for Blood should be used towards the end to finish-off bosses and tough foes.

Jobs

The primary Job for the Lancer is Dragoon. In order to become a Dragoon, the Lancer must have a level of 30, with at least 15 levels in the Marauder class as well.

Normally, Jobs aren’t quite ideal for solo gameplay, but the Dragoon with Marauder skills and its own unique set of jumping skills can be very good even in solo play.

Combat Role
The Dragoon boosts the typical Lancer damage with some very powerful jump AoE attacks that make it superior against multiple enemies.

In addition, acquiring powerful skills like Bloodbath from the Marauder skillset also increases survivability. The result is a very powerful damage-dealing class with a decent amount of off-tankish ability as well.

If you acquire the Dragoon job, I would recommend a few levels of investment in the Vitality attribute to give yourself much more survivability and a very balanced character.

Skills
All of the Dragoon skills are jump-attack related. They give the Lancer a variety of methods to tackle multiple enemies with different powerful AoE attacks. These skills make the Dragoon very good at handling multiple enemies at once. Below are the set of skills for the Dragoon:

Jump
Delivers a jumping attack with a potency of 200. Returns you to your original position after the attack is made.

Elusive Jump
Executes a jump to a location 15 yalms behind you, while removing any Heavy or Bind effects.

Spineshatter Dive
Delivers a jumping attack with a potency of 170.

Power Surge
Increases the damage dealt by a single Jump or Spineshatter Dive by 50%.

Dragonfire Dive
Delivers a jumping fire-based attack with a potency of 250 to all nearby enemies.

One of the long time staff at SegmentNext, Haider is an integral part of the team with a love for writing, playing guitar, and aviation.
Apart from writing for us, Haider is also a competitive FPS player and also enjoys exotic RPG games like Diablo and Xenogears (his favorite game of all time) on the side.